JACKPOT
!
read the headline. Obviously not athletes, the very ordinary men were wearing suits and ties and standing around a cluster of desks. Zina read the caption below the photograph:
Winners of the $87,000,000 jackpot in their downtown
Providence
office. The winning ticket was purchased by Ed Baynard, third from left. All eight men plan to continue working at their jobs in the insurance brokerage.
Eighty-seven million dollars!
What the shelter could do with all that money!
Zina
took a closer look at
the third man from the left, the one who had made them all millionaires. Ed Baynard was a middle-aged,
average
-looking man with an appealing grin and a pot belly. He looked ecstatic. They all did.
All except the tallest among them, the one on the right, the one whose face was slightly averted. Who looked somehow distressed to be caught on camera, as if he were ashamed to have won so much money without earning it.
What an odd pose, she thought. Maybe he dropped something and was looking around for it.
She studied his face more closely, aware that her cheeks had begun to burn and her heart to beat faster. It was impossible to see his features clearly, and his hair was so much shorter and receding,
and there was a kind of puffi
ness that was different, but
...
She studied his face more closely.
He had what looked like a mole on his right cheek. In the exact spot.
It wasn't him, of course. It couldn't be him. But her breath was coming short and fast now, and she felt weak. She found herself holding the folded paper up over her head and trying to see his face from underneath, an exercise in futility.
She studied his face more closely: squinting, tilting her head to one side, all the time aware of the thundering of her heart. What if it were him? Why couldn't it be him? He had to live somewhere, be something, do something. Why couldn't he be working in
Providence
for an insurance brokerage and buying tickets in a lottery pool?
She ran into
Marilyn
's office and, in a voice that didn't sound anything like her own, said, "A magnifying glass—please, I need one!"
Marilyn
looked up, startled. "I don't have one."
Zina looked around wildly, the way she would for a fire extinguisher if the next room were ablaze. "Oh, God. Oh, God, I have to go home."
The director jumped to her feet from behind her desk. "Are you all right? Are you feeling well?"
"Yes, I'm fine. But
... I have to go home."
"Now?"
"Now!"
"Is it truly important, Zina? Because we talked about how I was leaving at ten and wouldn't be back until one. And the woman is coming about the calico."
The director's
look of dismay said
very
plainly that Zina was failing her, failing the calico, failing
Florence
. All for a magnifying glass.
Zina raked her hands through the sides of her long blond hair while she reconsidered her overwrought reaction. It was not him. It couldn't be him. All this time, just a few hours' drive away? Not in
Hollywood
, not in
London
, but living in
Providence
? Not an actor, not a playwright, but an insurance agent?
She was making a fool of herself. Again. She had done it twice before—once, when she had chased a stranger down a street in
Boston
, and another time, more recently, when she had tried to convince Zack that she'd seen Jimmy in a home-mortgage commercial on cable TV.
Wrong then. Wrong now.
With a wrenching effort, she forced a smile. "I forgot that you had to go somewhere," she confessed. "This can wait,
Marilyn
. I'll stay."
"Are you sure?"
"Absolutely." She felt a nipping through her sock and looked down to see the calico wrapping its front paws around her ankle. Her melancholy smile turned more cheery.
"Monster. You're hungry, aren't you—or is it that you just want to play?" Scooping the calico up with both hands, she nuzzled
it
nose to nose and then carried the young cat out of the office.
"Dad! It's for you!"
Tyler
slapped the phone down and tore up the stairs, taking them two at a time, tripping near the top and recovering with a thump.
"
Tyler
,
walk
!
"
Wendy yelled up after him. "How many times do I have to tell you? And pull up those pants!"
There was, of course, no response from her son other than the slamming of his bedroom door to drown out the sounds of the new video game that he wasn't supposed to be playing until his homework was done. Sighing, Wendy brought in the overlooked newspaper, its underside damp from lying on the wet coco mat, and scanned the headlines before laying it alongside her husband's supper plate.
She was relieved to see that they were no longer frontpage news in the
Providence
Journal.
A new mess at City Hall, another empty mill burned to the ground, a groundbreaking ceremony for a new hotel—these were the stories currently on people's minds.
"Thank God," she muttered. "Maybe they'll leave us alone from now on."
After a glance at the upturned phone on the hall table, she walked over to the door of the basement stairs and called down. "Jim, did you hear
Tyler
?"
Her husband answered from the musty bowels of their tiny house, "Yeah, get that, would you?"
Jim was good at ping-ponging the minor irritants of life back to her to field. After all, he was the one who had to handle all the big stuf
f—like winning an eighty-seven-
million-dollar lottery. Wendy shook her head, unable, still, to come to terms with their new wealth. It had come so suddenly on the heels of their old poverty.
She picked up the phone and said, "I'm so
rr
y; Jim can't come to the phone right now. Can I take a message?"
There was a short pause, and then a cheerful voice answered, "Wendy, hi, it's me."
"Hey, Dave. What's up?"
Her brother was the reason that Wendy had met and married Jim in the first place. Dave and Jim had worked together in a motorcycle shop one summer, had hit it off, and had been pals ever since. Why not? They were two of a kind: fun-loving, optimistic, impulsive, and eerily flippant about money. Which was fine if, like Dave, you happened not to be the marrying kind and didn't need a certain amount of it to feed and clothe a family.
"So what's Jim up to? Has he spent all your winnings yet?"
Wendy let out a wary laugh. "He's trying. He's down in the basement with the contractor and the plumber, working on the estimate for the addition."
"It's gonna look great." There was another pause, and then Dave went on. "So. Here's the thing," he said sheepishly. "I've got a lee-tle problem with my cash flow this week. Just until my next paycheck."
No surprise there. Dave Ferro routinely had a leetle problem with his cash flow. That next paycheck was the elusive brass ring in the merry-go-round of his life.
"How much do you need?"
"Just the rent.
Eight
hundred."
"I'll have to
bring it up with
Jim."
"You know he'll say yes."
Wendy did know. "Stop by after supper, then; I'll write you a check."
"I'm keeping track, Wendy; so help me God I am. I'll pay back every cent the minute one of my ships comes in."
He had a whole fleet of them wandering around out there: Lotto, BigBucks, Powerball, a screenplay that he hoped Bruce Willis would option, and at least one patent that was apparently actually pending. Wendy wanted desperately for one of her brother's ships to sail back fully loaded—not because they couldn't afford to help him out, but because she couldn't bear the guilt for helping to corrupt him.
"I sure hope that that doohickey you invented for the motorcycle catches someone's eye," she said. It was a warning shot across his bow, but he never even heard it.
"Don't worry; it will. I may even go straight to the top and shop it to Harley one of these days. I mean, c'mon. Who
wouldn
't
want a clamp-on fire extinguisher for his bike?"
Someone who didn't expect his motorcycle to catch on fire, that's who; but her brother sounded so hopeful that Wendy couldn't point out the obvious to him. Besides, he'd managed to set his own bike on fire, so maybe it was a more common event than she realized.
They hung up and Wendy went down to see what there could be in a twenty-by-twenty-four-foot basement that could hypnotize three grown men for nearly two hours. She found them gathered in front of the furnace, looking like detectives at a homicide scene.
"The furnace should go. It's iffy whether it'll be able to heat the addition," the plumber was telling Jim. "Not to mention, today's burners are a lot more efficient." He checked the tag hanging from one of the galvanized pipes. "Although, actually, this one's not doing too bad."
"Yeah, but everything else will be new—copper pipes, baseboards, expansion tank," the contractor chimed in. "So why stop here?"
She saw her husband nod calmly and say, "I agree. By the time you're done with this project, what I want to see is basically a brand-new house."
From behind him she blurted, "Good grief, Jim, the furnace is only five years old. You're just throwing money down a hole!"
Jim turned and grinned as he threw his arm around her. "That's my girl; a tightfisted Yankee through and through." With a quick, soft kiss to her temple, he murmured, "Don't worry, honey. There'll still be money for your curtains and couches."
"But shouldn't we at least wait to see if this one's up to the—"
"Nope. We want new."
It wasn't true. Wendy had no great love for new. She liked old. Old and soft and worn, which was exactly what their little house on the edge of
Providence
's fashionable
East S
ide
still was. It had been built by her great-grandfather, and her parents had somehow managed to squeeze themselves and five children into its two and a half tiny bedrooms, and they had all somehow managed to keep clean and presentable with the aid of only one bathroom. It was her family's house, her house, abrim with memories she had no desire either to demolish or to plaster over.
All she had asked for, all she had
wanted, was one more room and another
bath; but her husband was determined to give her a castle.
One with a brand-new furnace. He looked so happy to be able to afford it all that Wendy found herself saying, "Maybe we'll be able to trade this one in or something."
"Nah. Not worth it." He
waved it out of his castle-to-
be. "Pete, you take it," he told the contractor. "Give it to someone who could use one."
It was a gesture that was typically Jim: impulsive, generous, oddly unnerving. He was such a loose cannon. He'd done the same thing with their refrigerator a few years earlier, after she had made the mistake of wondering aloud whether it wasn't cycling on and off too often. The next day it was gone and a new one in its place, courtesy of their overburdened Discover Card.
Their neighbors still had the old
Kenmore
, and it ran fine.
"Uh-oh. You have that look," Jim said as he followed her up the stairs behind
the two men. "That if-it-ain't-
broke-don't-fix-it look."
"I just think we need to sit down another couple of times with our—you know," she whispered over her shoulder to him. "The financial planner."
"Why? So he can slap us on a budget and make us miserable? The hell with that. I say, spend it before everyone else does."
"Shh!" she warned. He was so indiscreet.
Ignoring her, he went on to say, "Which reminds me: remember that express cruiser I was slobbering over last January at the boat show? I stopped in to look at one at Nathan's Marine yesterday. Man, that is one sweet vessel. Cherry interior, leather seats, air
... It'll do thirty knots and get us to
Newport
in no time flat, and the sound system will be good enough to drown out the noise on the way. Unless maybe we wanted to dock the boat in
Newport
. Yeah, maybe we should do that
..
.
."
Wendy wasn't listening as he rambled on, mostly because for the past few weeks he was always rambling on. He wanted too many things, too much stuff. It was like listening to a dog bark on and on; if it was your dog, pretty soon you hardly heard it anymore.